Putting On Your Face
by Tiamat's Child
Summary: Gene therapy gives you plenty of time to think. 'Die Another Day' ZaoMoon slash.


**Title:** Putting On Your Face  
**Author:** Tiamat's Child  
**Fandom: **Die Another Day  
**Pairing** Zao/Moon  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Summary:** Gene therapy gives you plenty of time to think.

**Putting On Your Face**

There's not a great deal to say. Or perhaps there is, and it's only that you don't think to say it. There are other ways to bring an idea across, and you've never really been one for words. He's the one for words, shaping them into speeches and arguments, rhetorical devices that hide the core of his thought or cut to the bone and show the truth. For him words are rapiers, quick and precise. You tend to use them more as blunt instruments, never having the patience for the spare elegance he loves.

No need for words now. There's just you and the soft hum of the machines. He's in Iceland, or London, maybe, and there's not much point in talking to yourself. You've never thought it a sign of insanity, to talk to yourself, but it is a waste of time. A waste of time and words, and it's not as if you've got a thousand perfect turns of phrase to throw away on yourself.

So, no words, just images and understanding and the complex patterns of the battle field forming and breaking apart and forming again across your mind, just as if it were one of the table top maps his father used to use. He never uses maps. You've taught him it's best to be able to see everything in your head. That way you can always keep the advantage even if circumstances turn against you, because you can change at an instant's notice.

Yes. Keep it all in your head so you don't need notes. No one can possibly take it away from you if you remember all of it, and keep it only in there, in your memory.

You keep everything, tucked away in places which no one else even knows exist. This is what makes you so dangerous. Of course you are ruthless, of course you are intelligent, of course you have near perfect aim and a body you can use to kill or wound precisely. And that's dangerous, but it's a normal kind of dangerous. Any number of agents can claim the same. You are a special sort of dangerous because you make sure that you remember. You don't need a database.

Because everything does mean everything, and you lie there very still, listening to the machine meant to give you a new persona thrumming away. It hurts. You don't think you've been in anything even near this much pain since the days just after the explosion, when your wounds were always a little infected because the diamonds wouldn't let them close over. And that was nothing like this.

He's always been fascinated by the diamonds embedded in your face. You think that to him they must be something important, a symbol of - what? What do your glittering scars mean to him? You don't know. You try not to think about it too much.

You wouldn't mind if were just a thrill of realization he feels when he passes his fingertips over your face, the wonderful little shock of knowing that you will still be there with him no matter what physical (and otherwise) hurts you acquire while helping him. That is what they mean to you.

Not that you think of them this way. It's only that when you pass your fingertips over your face, pressing down just a bit, just enough to hurt, to feel a bright flare of determination to get back to him, to do what you must and get back to him.

You love him, after all.

It's entirely possible you've never bothered to tell him this. It's not something you've kept track of. And if you haven't, why would you need to? After all, it's simply something you _know_. It's a fact, and facts generally need telling only if they are not immediately obvious. Zao Loves Moon is surely in the same category of fact as Fire Burns, instantly clear after one encounter with the elements in question.

Surely. You're here, after all, putting on a category mask so you can go back to Iceland and stay with him until the end, whatever that may be. You're certain it will be victory, but if it isn't... Welll, there's no room in your mind for that possibility, of course, but if there were you wouldn't really worry. All will be well.

All will be well because it is him, and he as the devil's own luck, and you love him.

It's not so simple as thinking it. You don't have to think it and you don't have to put it in words, not for yourself. You just know it. You believe it.

It's a faith thing, really.

Which is why you are here.

It's an odd sensation, lying here quiet and in pain and feeling new patterns of thought and memory weave their way across your mind, binding all the things that make you you underneath their net of false pasts. Part of you wants to rebel, wants to protest the taking way of the easy, old, comfortable ways of thought. That part insists that the part that is being woven tight into a web is what makes you what you are on the most fundamental level there is.

Another part of you knows better. The thought patterns, the personality,these things are only the second layer to who a human being is. There are deeper things that no mere hypnosis tape - no matter how sophisticated - can touch. You know. You look at him and he looks nothing like Moon, doesn't move like Moon, doesn't speak the same way, and yet... and yet he is still Moon. You _know _him.

This cannot truly harm you. Nor can it change you. It hasn't changed him. Nothing can.

Under patterns of movement and thought and speech, there is always this. And this, this knowing, silent, fundamental self, is the thing that is important. The thing that survives.

You know, you understand, that this is true - the personality is an illusion, a cover for something deeper. You know this part of Moon. He knows this part of you.

And so you will change your mask, and go back to him, and face the new world together, having lost only a talisman scar.


End file.
